


don’t try to sleep through the end of the world and bury me alive.

by themissinglenk



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin
Genre: M/M, from tumblr, prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-12
Updated: 2013-11-12
Packaged: 2018-01-01 06:40:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1041568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themissinglenk/pseuds/themissinglenk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eren knew that, just like before, Jean watched. // from tumblr, open prompts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	don’t try to sleep through the end of the world and bury me alive.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vtown2000](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=vtown2000).



Eren knew that, just like before, Jean watched.

He was drifting somewhere peaceful and fake, where the rhythm of his breath and tempo of his heart was a warm and cosseting lullaby of semi-consciousness. A dream, reality as gauzy as a scrim of a fabric over the window, astigmatic like opening your eyes under water. A ringing in his ears over distant voices. One creak of the floorboard or scrape of the chair jerking him awake suddenly only for his eyes to roll back into his head offering him up again to the limp and lethargic sleep of recovery. Glare of lamplight, eyes dilating. Sticky with sweat. Tossing. Turning. A feverish chill prompting him to seek out the lazy heat under the blankets, toes curling.

Armin watched over him, and in the sick confused state between dreams and the awake world, the way the bouncing light framed his silhouette was like the laurel of gold around angel faces as he leaned down, brushing dark hair out of the way so Mikasa could wipe the blood from below Eren’s nose with the damp cloth she kept near the food he couldn’t touch.

Eren wanted to get up, so badly. His body ached. His head pounded. His fingers tingled and his stomach was so empty, his eyes so sensitive. He knew intimately which spots on his pillow he’d drooled on when he really fell asleep and wasn’t stuck somewhere in this miasma between day and night, living and dead. And that wasn’t okay.

Once or twice, Eren was sure the Captain stopped by—and the Commander, too. To check on their precious little monster, of course. Their weapon of war in humanity’s counterattack. And by _checking on_ , anyway, it was just that they wanted to know if he was well enough to interrogate about recent crucial events.

It seemed the Captain stood at the foot of his bed for what felt like eternities, staring with those dark eyes of his, arms crossed, and—“Please don’t hate me because I’m alive and those you loved aren’t!”

Maybe he said it out loud. Maybe he imagined it. Maybe it had all been a dream, every second of it. He didn’t know and nobody ever told him.

Feeling your limbs grow back was a very disturbing sensation.

First it was hot, and then it was cold, and then as all the baby nerves sparked to life and the ligaments and bones fused and the skin coiled into the pattern of remembered fingerprints, it made him sick to his stomach and he prayed to just sleep through it, sleep through it—!

Eren thought at one point his mother was there, too. But that part really was a dream, and he woke up as he realized she was not there; he was talking in his sleep and everyone was staring at him. Could they stop looking at him like he was so tragic? So haunted? God dammit, who _didn’t_ talk to their dead mothers in the space between sleeping and waking?

When inhuman biotics finally abated and he opened his eyes one afternoon ecstatic to be free from the torpor of healing, Eren sat straight up and choked, “I have to piss like a fucking race horse—”

He let Mikasa prop him up with pillows and he yielded to Armin’s rough embrace, and he sat and gawked around the room like every one of his senses were being renewed. Touch, taste, feel, smell, look, listen— Colors were bright and the world was clear, and Hanji sat cross-legged on the bed with Armin like kids gathered around story-time watching him scarf down his food despite all of Mikasa’s urgings to slow down before he choked himself.

And Jean stood in the corner, silent. Cold. Hard. Casting his eyes away at every one of Eren’s curt glances, because he knew as well as Eren knew that while Armin and Mikasa had tended to him, he’d just lingered there in the periphery watching.

 _Watching_.

Eren watched, too.

When another expedition beyond the walls resulted in nothing more than a handful of injuries and more questions, and Jean boasted three broken ribs, old bruises and new bruises and a minor concussion that was being monitored very carefully—Eren watched.

“We need to set his arm,” they said, and Jean was a disoriented groaning mess, asking for long-gone brothers and sisters and friends, and everyone’s eyes had swung around to him when Eren grunted:

“I’ll sit by him.”

He felt sick, summoning from memory the scene, rosary of flashes like light off a mirror—Jean, thrown to the ground. Maneuver cords snapped. Crunch of bone. Burst of red from his mouth. Armin’s awful scream, a sound of terror and fury woven into one, and the clouds of dirt kicked up by the horses when even Hanji had redirected to rescue a fallen comrade.

Maybe it was just—even after all the expeditions—all the missions and trials and tragedies—nobody wanted to go through it again. Empty chairs and empty tables. Maybe choosing which lives were worth saving was a glimmer of salvageable humanity.

They had to take a syringe of poppy tears to Jean just to set his broken arm. It was a little bit pathetic, but Eren didn’t tell him that. Just sat by him stroking sweat-damp hair out of his face and frowning down at the belt they’d given him to bite (which the way it ended up going was much more like a well-meant gag) and he told himself that the only reason he let Jean white-knuckle him through the procedure was because it would have been cruel to make him endure it alone.

 _Snap_ of the bone in a practiced grip. Splints and bandages and the tension in the room sharpened to a point, ears ringing with long-gone heckles and shouts as the brigade had made their way back in through the city gates, citizens flooding the streets some to throw trash and insults, others to beg for their loved ones’ faces, others yet to pay court to the boldest and therefore stupidest branch of Utopia’s soldiers.

The silence in the room before Jean woke up was like the awful silence before dawn, when the whole world seemed dead or at least in a state of deep depression.

He didn’t mean for the barrage of questions. It really was an accident. But he was alone in the sick bay with Jean and his chest was tight with an odd sort of anxiety and his fingers tightened into clammy fists on his knees as the words just came out like verbal vomit before he even stopped to pace himself.

“Why didn’t you sit by _me_ like I just sat by you?” Eren demanded hoarsely. Oops. He sounded emotionally invested.

“I can’t breathe without feeling like someone’s burying a million knives in my side and you’re really going to fucking grill me?” Jean husked, and Eren was sort of jealous of his coherence. Then again, there was nothing superhuman about his recovery. Just the pain.

Eren propped his feet up on the bedside, looking at—anything but Jean’s fiery eyes. Dirt, under the fingernails. Dried blood on the knuckles. Bruise like the proud flag of a tavern fight brawl on the bridge of the nose. Flawlessly executed splint on a broken arm. Never mind. He didn’t want to look at those things. They terrified him. The fragility of man was horrifying suddenly, in a bizarre way that hadn’t ever seemed to touch him before. Back when he’d been a little more ignorant. All madman’s suicidal passion and glory, without the sliver of bitter understanding lent to him by Squad Levi’s rescue from an execution at the corrupt hands of “justice” and “safety”.

“You avoided me,” Eren muttered. What was this, a lovers’ quarrel?

“You were out cold,” Jean said, raw and ragged.

“You could have at least pretended to care.”

“Why? You have two people who’d fucking sacrifice themselves to protect you.”

“Don’t make me feel shitty because people care about me.” Choking on a breath. “Did it bother you? Did you think of _him_? Is that why you sulked in the corner—because you hate me for still being alive—”

Fuck. It was really a problem sometimes, jumping the gun with his thoughts like that. It wasn’t that he didn’t mean what he said, or say what he meant, and sometimes he was really good at the whole speech thing but—sometimes, again, he was really bad at the tact thing. Mikasa never failed to remind him of such. Armin, too.

Jean’s eyes were cold and critical. A torn little breath caught on his lower lip. And then the dead and jaded look went away, flooded out by a veneer of tears. Man’s tears. Tears held back. Hot, glassy glare.

“Why would you even say that?” Jean gritted out. He tried to sit up on his elbow. He gave up halfway, with a sharp grimace suddenly remembering his broken arm.

Chords of betrayal rang vaguely jagged in his voice, and Eren felt the curtain of shame drop heavy on his shoulders.

“Because I don’t hate you,” he seethed. He didn’t know why he was so worked up. It was like that scene in the mess hall back in training, all over again. God, the feeling was nostalgic in a sick way. The guilt was bruising. The frustration was thick. His hands shook. His jaw was tight. His heart throbbed and he was getting _pissed_ , so desperate to be understood, to get answers to the questions that had taunted him since he’d seen Jean hit the ground like a rag doll—

“ _I don’t hate you_ ,” he said again. “I actually appreciate you as a person, all right? That’s why I’m sitting by you. Because—”

Jean’s lip curled in an emotional snarl. “Because you’re the bigger person, you win, I lose. I’m pathetic. I’m weak. I should just die. I have no one to sit by me but a maniac bastard like you. Right?”   

“ _No_.”

Jean flinched back like Eren had struck him. Eren recoiled in turn because he hadn’t expected to say it so fierce and full of feeling. And then out came the wave of reckless words again:

“No, you fucking jackass! That’s not what I was going to say! I don’t think you’re pathetic. I think you’re pretty fucking strong. Jean, I didn’t want you to be alone. You’re one of us! It’s not just me, Mikasa, and Armin anymore. It’s you, too! Don’t you get that? That’s why—that’s why I asked why you didn’t sit by me. It just feels pretty lousy when someone you consider your friend pretends not to care how you’re doing—”

“ _Friend_ ,” Jean echoed, like the word had a bad taste. Like it meant something different coming from Eren. Like he’d forgotten what it was like to be brave enough to care for someone who could be gone in an instant.

Ah, what a fucking mess of feelings this was.

Silence.

Jean covered his eyes with his good arm and whispered, “Just because I didn’t sit by you doesn’t mean I wasn’t worried.”

And with that—just that—something deep and maddeningly simple shifted. Like a lock giving way to the right key. _Click_. Interlocking of fates. The prodigy and the psycho. The line between virtuoso and insanity. They were too alike and yet too different; that was the problem.

Eren wilted in his bedside chair like he’d been winded. He shook his head, brow knotting. His heart hurt. His fingernails scraped against his trousers as his fists tightened. He had nothing to say, because that was enough. That was the truce, and the explanation, and the forgiveness, and the acquiescence. _Friend_.

How long would it take for Jean to get over it? For the wounds under the splints to heal—figuratively, literally? Tortured. Tortured man. Tortured himself _…_

Didn’t matter.

Because that—

_Doesn’t mean I wasn’t worried…_

—that was progress.

And that was enough.

  
_**end.** _


End file.
